ArticleIssue #150 | The 5-Interaction Rule (And Why Organic Creates Paid Wins)
Before we dive in, a quick note: this issue is a continuation of last week’s piece on killing your content calendar and building a Content Engine. If you missed it, I’d recommend giving it a read first. If you’re short on time, the tl;dr is this: most content strategies fail because they’re built around arbitrary publishing schedules rather than systems designed to create genuine audience connection. If you’re bought into the “why” behind that theory, this week’s issue is best viewed as the “how to make it happen.”
Over the past few months, I’ve been systematically analyzing a group of ~20 brands (B2B, B2C, B2G, B2B2C) that are winning. And when I say “winning,” I don’t mean racking up vanity metrics or living off social media trendiness; I mean brands (and agencies, and consultants, and service providers) that are driving measurable, profitable growth and capturing market share in an environment where both of those things are wildly difficult to achieve.
My goal in looking at those brands is to find the commonality – the pattern – that I think most marketers are missing entirely: the brands succeeding in paid media are the same ones winning on organic social.
On some level, that might sound obvious – but the implications are anything but. It means you can no longer buy your way out of poor organic performance. It means the era of “we’ll figure out the creative later” is definitively over. It means that the line between “brand” and “performance” (a distinction I’ve always abhorred) has effectively collapsed. Organic social is – in many ways – the new beginning-of-the-maze/top-of-the-funnel…and that’s a conversation most people aren’t ready for.
The Causality Problem
Let’s start with an observation that might ruffle some feathers: most brands are measuring paid media success incorrectly.
They look at ROAS. They look at CPA. They look at conversion rates. And when those numbers look good, they assume they’re “winning.” But those metrics don’t tell you why someone converted. They just tell you that they did.
What I’ve observed in high-performing organizations is a fundamentally different relationship between organic and paid. Organic isn’t merely a “brand awareness” play that eventually, hopefully, maybe drives downstream outcomes; organic is doing the heavy lifting of building familiarity, trust and emotional resonance. Paid is simply scaling what’s already working.
Put another way: organic creates the conditions for paid to succeed; paid amplifies and accelerates that reaction.
This flips the traditional model on its head. Most brands treat organic as an afterthought – something the social media intern handles between “real” marketing activities. For most “traditional” orgs, advertising is where the money goes, so that’s what receives the lion’s share of the attention.
The brands I’ve been studying do something different.
They use organic as a testing ground. They observe what resonates – not just what gets likes, but what content types, formats, styles, hooks, angles and messages drive comments, shares, saves and the qualitative signals that indicate genuine audience connection. They then take those learnings (and those posts) and apply them to paid media.
The result? Their paid creative doesn’t feel like advertising. It feels like content. Because it is content – content that was already proven to resonate before a single dollar was spent.
I’ve started calling this the OPP (“organic to paid pipeline) – and I think it’s the single most under-discussed tactic available to marketers right now.
The immediate response of several brands when I shared this was, “so we just have to do more organic social and paid will perform better?”
Short answer: no.
That question gets the causality confused – it isn’t “do more organic social and paid will be better; it’s “do things that tend to produce better organic content, apply them to paid, and watch everything get better.”
Subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.
The 5-Interaction Rule
The brands winning on organic right now have something in common that has nothing to do with their content calendars or their tech stacks: their leadership teams are obsessively, almost uncomfortably close to their customers.
This isn’t “audience research” in the traditional sense (a PDF deck delivered by a consultant once a year that gets referenced in a single strategy meeting and then forgotten); it’s a daily habit. A cultural norm.
Here’s my new rule for 2026, and I’m dead serious about it:
If your leadership team does not have at least 5 direct interactions with actual customers per month, they should be fired.
That sounds harsh. But let me explain why I believe this so strongly.
The single biggest predictor of content quality is intimacy with the audience. Not creative talent (though that helps). Not budget (though that helps too). Intimacy. The deep, almost intuitive understanding of what your customers care about, worry about, aspire to and struggle with.
You cannot manufacture that understanding from dashboards or consultant reports. You cannot delegate it to your marketing team and expect it to somehow osmose back up to the lofty perch where your C-suite sits. You must earn it through direct contact.
- Read the support tickets. Not the polite summaries, the actual tickets.
- Reply to the LinkedIn comments on your brand’s post. Personally, from your own account, with a real response (not that AI-generated hogwash)
- Go to a sales meeting. Listen to how prospects describe their problems.
- Sit in on a customer success call. Hear what’s working and what isn’t. What features people would love to have and what parts of your offering just don’t make sense.
- Walk the sales floor at a retail location. Talk to the people shopping there. Ask about their lives. Their challenges. Their fears + frustrations. What they like (or hate) about the product.
- Email a current customer/subscriber – for no other reason than to ask how things are going/what’s on their mind/how you can support them.
There are no shortcuts here. Just like a great chef must be in the restaurant talking to patrons AND in the kitchen observing/leading the staff, so too must a great executive be in the day-to-day of the business while talking to the people it serves.
This applies whether you’re selling software, products or services. In fact, I’d argue it matters more for service businesses (agencies, consultants, professional services) because the relationship IS the product. There’s nothing else to fall back on if things go sideways.
I’ve seen this play out dozens of times. When an agency founder stops sitting in on client calls, or a consultant stops understanding what keeps their clients up at night, the work starts to feel generic. Safe. Forgettable. And clients can always tell, even if they can’t articulate exactly what’s missing.
The 5-Interaction Rule isn’t just about gathering insights. It’s about building the muscle memory of customer empathy that makes great content possible. When leadership is in constant contact with customers, that understanding infuses everything, from service delivery to marketing strategy to the actual words that end up in your content.
I’ve long been a proponent of the theory that the organizations that succeed are those with a CEO/Founder who is willing to fight for them. Well, step #1 of doing that is actually understanding who’s on board, what you’re up against and how people are talking about you.
Great content comes from genuine understanding of your audience – the kind of understanding you can’t fake and you can’t outsource to AI.
Emotive Marketing: Talk to the Feeling, Not the Feature
The second pattern I’ve noticed in winning brands is Emotive Consistency.
Most content (especially in B2B) defaults to being “educational” or “informational” – Here are five tips. Here’s how our service works. Here are the features. Here’s a case study. Here’s how other brands have used our thing and gotten this result.
Educational. Informative. Boring.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing wrong with educational content. But educational content alone will never build the kind of emotive connection that drives organic virality and paid efficiency.
The brands winning right now aren’t just educational; they’re emotive.
They understand that their customers don’t just have problems; they have feelings about those problems. Frustration. Anxiety. Apprehension. Aspiration. Fear. Dread. Those brands don’t merely speak to the problem; they address the emotion attached to it.
Let me give you an example. Say you’re an agency selling project management consulting. The educational approach would be: “Here are 7 ways to run more efficient meetings.” Fine. Useful. Completely unoriginal (there are millions of results on Google, over 100,000 videos on YouTube and countless AI summaries).
The emotive approach would be: “You know that sinking feeling when you realize the meeting that was supposed to be 30 minutes is now pushing 90, you’ve already had to cancel another call AND there’s no decision in sight? Yeah. We fix that.”
The second version speaks to the experience of the problem. It makes the reader feel seen. It creates true recognition – that moment where someone thinks, “Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel.”
That recognition is the foundation of organic engagement. People share content that makes them feel seen, heard and understood. They comment on content that articulates something they’ve struggled to put into words. They save content that feels like it was written specifically for them.
When you scroll through a winning brand’s feed, you see a reflection of your own internal thoughts/struggles/challenges/ideas. That’s what emotive consistency looks like in practice.
Doing that requires the kind of customer intimacy we talked about in the previous section (see how this all connects?). You can’t speak to feelings you don’t understand. But once you have that understanding, the content almost writes itself.
A practical exercise: Take your last 10 pieces of content and audit them for emotional resonance. For each one, ask: “What feeling does this speak to?” If the answer is “none” or “I’m not sure,” you’ve identified an opportunity.
Optimizing for Consumption Habits
Last week, I talked about “going wide” – the idea that you should be producing more content across more channels rather than obsessing over perfection on a single platform.
But the brands that are really winning take this a step further. They don’t just post more; they post differently for different personas.
Think about how differently people consume content:
- A CEO might have 90 seconds between meetings to scan a text-based LinkedIn post
- A practitioner might watch a 15-minute technical breakdown on YouTube
- A visual learner might engage most deeply with a carousel
- A commuter might listen to a 45-minute podcast episode
These are fundamentally different consumption contexts, driven by different constraints and preferences. And yet most brands create one piece of content and either post it everywhere in the same format or “repurpose” it by chopping it into smaller pieces that lose all context and nuance.
The tactical play is to think in layers:
Layer 1: The Core Asset: your long-form piece containing the full depth of your thinking on a topic.
Layer 2: Format Variations: a text summary for readers. A carousel for visual learners. A short-form video for scrollers. An audio clip for listeners. The important part of this is that these aren’t simply clips of the same thing – they’re unique expressions of the same core idea
Layer 3: Platform Optimization: each format tuned to the conventions of where it will be shared. A LinkedIn carousel looks different from an Instagram carousel. A TikTok video has different conventions than a YouTube Short.
This sounds like a lot of work, until you realize that you’re not creating more ideas (which is the time-consuming part); you’re creating more expressions of the same ideas. The intellectual work happens once. The production work increases..
Diversity of medium is how you capture diversity of attention.
Thematic Discipline: Building Your Content Moat
The final pattern – and in some ways, the most important is Thematic Discipline.
Winning brands stay in their lane. Aggressively.
In a world where everyone is chasing the latest trend, trying to newsjack whatever’s happening, and attempting to be everything to everyone, the brands that win resist that temptation.
They build their content strategy around a small number of themes where they have a genuine perspective and a defensible advantage. They identify the topics where their expertise runs deepest, where their perspective is most differentiated, and then they hammer those themes relentlessly.
Not once. Not occasionally. Relentlessly.
This feels counterintuitive. Shouldn’t you cover more topics to reach more people? Shouldn’t you diversify to avoid being boring?
No.
In fact, the opposite is true.
In a noisy content environment (and we are in the noisiest content environment in human history) repetition is a feature, not a bug. You need to say the same thing, in different ways, across different formats, dozens of times before it starts to stick in your audience’s mind.
My dear friend Aaron Orendorff likes to joke that the moment you feel physically ill at the thought of posting that content – that idea, that perspective, that whatever – again….that’s the moment where your audience is just starting to pay attention to it.
The curse of novelty is real. As marketers, we remember everything we’ve ever written. We always want to be new, innovative, different. We want to create 1,000 new articles, when the reality is that is the exact wrong thing to do.
Put simply: the brands that win own mental real estate. When someone in their target audience thinks about [topic X], that brand is the first name that comes to mind. That doesn’t happen by covering everything. It happens by covering a few things with such depth and consistency that you become synonymous with them.
I think of this as building a content moat. Anyone can create content. Very few brands have the discipline to go deep enough on a specific set of themes that they become un-copyable. That accumulated expertise, perspective and authority becomes the moat.
Ask yourself: What are the 3-5 themes where you have an unfair advantage? Where can you say something that no one else can say as well? Those themes should form the backbone of your content strategy. Everything else is noise.
The Bottom Line
The brands winning right now aren’t doing it through some secret hack or magical algorithm exploit. They’re doing it through fundamentals:
- They’re close to their customers (The 5-Interaction Rule)
- They speak to emotions, not just features (Emotive Consistency)
- They meet their audience where they are (Diversity of Medium)
- They go deep on a few themes rather than wide on many (Thematic Discipline)
At the highest level, this is what I’m trying to get you to see: paid doesn’t create belief. It just rents attention long enough to see whether belief already exists. And in 2026, belief is built in public—through repeated exposure to a point of view, a cadence of relevance, and the feeling that a brand actually understands what it’s like to be the person on the other side of the screen.
That’s why the organic-to-paid pipeline works when it works. Not because you posted more. Not because you “stayed consistent.” But because you did the work that makes good content inevitable: you stayed embarrassingly close to customers, you learned to speak to the emotion underneath the problem, you expressed the same idea in the formats people actually consume, and you picked a few themes you’re willing to own so relentlessly that people start to associate your name with them. Do that, and paid stops feeling like a slot machine. It becomes an amplifier. Ignore it, and you’ll keep staring at dashboards trying to optimize your way out of a creative and connection problem.
I’m a huge believer in the notion “show me your calendar and I’ll tell you what you value” – so ere’s your homework for this week: Look at your calendar. How many times are you scheduled to actually talk to a customer? Not review reports about customers. Actually talk to a real human being who pays you money?
If the answer is zero, change it. Today.
Cheers,
Sam
